G E N E T W O R K

targeted mutations. These include: up- coming meethlgs and workshops; courses and demonstrations; abstracts; books; review articles; labomto~ manuals; te,Th- nical novelties; video guides; facilities; nomenclature; and animal welfare legis- lation and regulations.

There are several groups that are pro- viding databases and services on the Internet, which are important resources for people working in this area. A few of the most important ones are listed below.

The Jackson Laboratory InducedMu- tant Resource (IMR). The IMR was estab- lished to import, cryopreserve, maintain and distribute biomedically important transgenic, chemically induced and tar- geted mutant strains of mice to the research community 2.

The Mouse Genome Database, MGD, is an integrated database of mouse genome information and supporting software for data importation, analysis, display, publication and distribution5.

The Community of Science database of all the projects involving transgenic animals and gene targeting currently funded by the NIH (Ref. 4).

The Whitehead lnstitute/MIT mouse genetic maps represent the 1Q95 release of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research mouse genetic map. The map consists of 6183 polymor- phie mouse microsatellite repeats mapped on a C57BL/6J--ob/ob multi CAST F2 intercross 5.

The MBx database was created to hold experimental data derived from the

European Collaborative Interspecffic Back~oss project and stores mouse, locus and probe data. It stores all allele data at each chromosome locus for each of the 1000 backcross progeny 6.

Many more such resources are linked to TBASE and a broader collection of information about rodents, in general, is available from The Mouse and Rat Research Home Page at Caltech 7.

D~,..n J a ¢ o l ~ o n danj@gdb.org

Anna ~aagaostopoulos anna@gdb.org

School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Unir~rsity, 2024 East Monument Street,

Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.

I t ' s a K n o c k o u t ! Future issues of Trends in Genetics will feature

a new column entitled 'It's a Knockout!', every two ( ~ or three months. 'It's a Knockout!' will present selected

data extracted from TBASE to give a brief overview of current research utilizing transgenics and targeted mutations.

B O O K R E V I E W S

Burr re~examined

Cyril Burt: Fraud o r Framed?

edited by N.J. Mackintosh

Oxford University Press, 199-3. £19.99 hbk (vii and 168 pages) ISBN 0 19 852336 X

Since his death in 1971, when two of the authors in this collection. Atthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck, eulogized him as having made fundamental contributions to the study of the heritability of intelligence. Cyril Butt's reputation has lurched wildly. Within fimr years. following Kamin's reanalysis of Butt's purported data on ~parated twins. Jensen was backtracking in his evaluation of someone he had regarded as a fine example of an 'English gentleman'. Faced with evidence of Butt's attempts to block his own professional advancement, thrcmgh a combination of personal dislike and antisemitism (misplaced, as Eysenck has made it clear that Butt knew he was not Jewish) Eysenck too modified his position. There followed Gillie's claim that Butt had not merely invented his twirts but

also his research a~sistants. In 1979 the authoritative biography by Heamshaw went beyond endorsement to extend the earlier charges, now interpreted in terms of Burt's neurops2,'chiatric disturtyance. Ten years later, Joynson and, later, Fletcher published books claiming to vindit-ate Butt and began the process of rehabilitation.

Now Professor Mackintosh has edited a slim volume with contributions by Eysenck and Jensen as well as reanalyses of the Butt data and the claims of his advocates and critics by Blinkhom and Mascie-Taylor, which we may hope (but doubt) will be the last word on the subject. The book will chiefly be interesting for the historical significance of the Eysenck and Jensen papers, as each now complete their distancing both from Butt the man and from his empirical

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data. whilst retaining their commitment to the broad claims as the high heritability of intelligence (IQ). Blinkhom reassesses Butt's contribution to factor analysis. Where Heamshaw had claimed that Butt unfairly attempted to assert his primacy over Spearman, Blinkhom judges him more kindly as, in fact, merely struggling to prevent his own erasure by the American school.

Mas.cie-Taylor and Mackintosh revaluate Burt's claims with respect to the relationship of IQ to .social mobility and to the mysterious twins, the most famous non-persons in the history, of psycholo~, other, perhaps, than the Kallikak family. The conclusion? Heamshaw and Gillie might have ovetraated the case, and Kamin might have ~ t his critique into an overall political context that Mackintosh would rather distance himself from, but the core of the anti-Butt charges stick. Despite Joyrtson and Fletcher, and the non-proven motivation for just how, and when, the twin data was calculated and inserted into the heritability tables, the fact that the data itself cannot be taken seriously is once again established beyond doubt.

Is all this laborious recalculation of Butt's correlation coefficients and speculations about misprints in copying from tables in one paper to tables in another worthwhile? Is the Butt affair the equivalent of the Piltdown hoax? Piltdown misled a generation of anthropologists. Bert's data fitted the consensus of hereditarian psychometricians sufficiently well that its significance is quite different. Whatever his motivation, he was committed to the view that IQ tests measure sometLi.,ag objective about individuals, that complex statistical manipulations can

B O O K R E V I E W S

reveal biological reality and that heritability measures can usefully be applied to psychometric measurements of human aptitudes. None of the authors in this collection considers these matters; they clearly regard them as unassailable propositions, but they surely lie at the root of the affair. Bull's quirk; are a matter for his biographers and the embarrassed shuffling of his former friends. Jensen and Eysenck are right that they do not fundamentally affect the so-called 'hereditarian' conclusion concerning the heritability of IQ; removing Butt's data from the

set leaves the meta-analysis relatively unaffected. The real debates about IQ - the significance of what it measures and the social nature of its construction, the difference between individual and group (race, class and gender) measures and the persistent misunderstanding by psychometricians of the applicability of heritability formulae - remain alive.

Steven Rose s.p.r.rose@open.ac.uk

Department of Biology, Open Universit.l; Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK MK7 6AA.

Medical history

The History of a Genetic Disease: Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy or Meryon's Disease by Alan E.H. Emery and Marcia L.H. Emery

Royal Society of Medicine Press, 1995. £20.00/$40.00 hbk (xviii and 248 pages) ISBN 1 8"5315 2498

This Ixook combines an essay in medical histot 3' with a compl~hensive and up-to-date review of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Alan Emery" is well known for his publications on neuromuscular disorders, especially Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and on the statistical methodology of human genetics. Now, with Marcia Emery, he takes the reader on a historical journey through the grtmah of knowlt.xlge about tiffs disease, in parallel with the development of clinical and genetic medicine sittce early Victorian times.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is an ideal vehicle for such a iouruey. In the 1980s. the discovery of the gene for Duchenne on Xp21 and its protein product, dystrophin, was the first of many triumphs of the molecular analysis of diseases for which the protein was unknown before, the search began. The research led to improvements in genetic management that are still being refined, and raised the tantalizing though still unfulfilled prospect of gene therapy.

In one of its most interesting passages the book outlines some theoretical and clinical questions about the Duchenne gene and the disease that are still unresolved. It also notes that research on Duchenne muscular

dystrophy has revealed much new information about genetic mechanisms in generak for example, cytogenetic deletion as a cause of mutation, structural changes in the X chromosome and their effect on the expression of X-linked traits, and the significance of germinal mosaicism.

To date there has been no striking breakthrough in treatment, in spite of much effott. The authors tabulate numerous drugs used in clinical trials with little benefit, but they also hold out some hope that a drug that would interrupt the cascade of pathways involved in tile pathogenesis of the disease could yet be found. Myoblast transfer, a controversial procedure, seems unpromising at present and gene therapy is not yet clinically effective. The intransigence of the disease to treatment makes the genetic approach to prevention all the more important.

The story is a reminder that many of the im'estigative approaches that our generation takes for granted, such as microscopy and electromyography, are actually quite recent. The germ theory of disease dates only from the 1880s, and medical genetics was unknown until early in the twentieth century. Even the term .scientist did not exist until 1833.

Meryon and Duchenne were not the first to study patients with this disease. The book briefly describes the contributions of four forerunners, Bell, Conte, Partridge and Little. To today's physicians, accustomed to rigid requirements for training and qualifications, the education and working conditions of these physicians of the early nineteenth century are astonishing, and their achievements all the more outstanding.

The major figure in the book, of course, is Edward Meryon (1807-1880). Meryon was the first to make a systematic study of the disease, predating Duchenne's work by several years. His study, first presented in 1851, included microscopical descriptions, and led him to the correct conclusion that the disease was a disease of muscle and not of the spinal cord. However, Meryon's work seems to have been unnoticed by his peers, whereas Duehenne's slightly later publications were widely read and cited and the disease came to be known by his name.

It seems unlikely, in spite of the case made for him by the Emerys, that Meryon's name will ever replace Duchenne's as the eponym for the disease. Nevettheless, the Emerys have made a significant contribution to the ongoing story of Duchenne muscular dystrophy and to medical history by this lively and thoroughly researched account.

Margaret W. Thompson

Departmenl of Genetics, The Hospital for Sick Childrett, Toronto,

Ontario, Canada M5G IXS.

I t ' s e a s y t o s u b s c r i b e t o T I G Just email journals@elscvle t . tm,uk

or call *44 1865 fl43300 or ÷1 914 524 9200 or fax +44 18651114.3940 or +1 914 333 2/1/14

All you need to provide is your name, addre&% the month from which you would like your subscription to start, your credit card number and its expiry date. (Please do not send credit card details by email.)

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